The new apartment

View from our front door:
The kids' room. Note that books are usually all over the floor because Julian's current favorite activity is pulling the books off of the white shelf one by one and creating a lovely pile to trip over later on. Well, that's probably tied for first place with climbing onto Ava's bed and jumping up and down while holding onto the railing at the foot of the bed, which gives me "agida" as they say in New Jersey:

Dining room and the little desk where I am sitting right now:
Living room with no curtains, coffee table and TV (and we're surviving -- oh the hardships of life overseas!):
Our front door:

Laundry

Check out this handy system for sharing a small laundry room in a 6-story apartment building. You move your assigned key-lock to the a.m. or p.m. slot on this board, thereby avoiding the following scenario: running down to see if the machines are in use, running upstairs and throwing kids and laundry in a basket, and running down again only to find some guy on the 1st floor got there before you.

Moving day

Have we become crazy European hoarders since arriving in Sweden? No! We've only moved, taking down an entire forest in the process! I'm SO GLAD the movers wrapped a bundle of my pencils in 55 sheets of paper before putting it in a cardboard box with other similarly packaged items and topping the box off with another 43 sheets of paper. I mean, the sense of relief that my pencils had no chance of getting damaged en route is tremendous. Sigh. It should be noted that all of our furniture, and my Subaru Forester, made it to Sweden with no additional knicks, dings or cracks, but I do wonder if all this garbage is the only way. Anyway.

Aside from the environmental fiasco, our move into our new apartment in Goteborg went pretty well. The guys from Crown Relocations were very nice (no surprise, they're Swedish) and unpacked everything (thus the mayhem of the paper pile in the picture above), leaving us with huge piles of stuff to find homes for. If an international move has taught us one thing it's that we don't need so much stuff. I kept opening boxes going "More? We have MORE toys/jeans/Q-tips/cloth napkins????" Seriously, how many sets of placemats and napkins does one family need? I promptly created 4 big bags of stuff to give away (though I have no idea where to donate this stuff, but it's going, I swear).

This picture of the kids' room, and particularly Adrian's expression (he he) sort of sums up moving day. Boxes everywhere, exhaustion, hunger, children excited and frantic. But at the end of the day we were so relieved to be in our "permanent" Swedish home, and pretty much in love with our rambling, fifth-floor apartment on Sodra Vagen.

New digs

This week we signed a contract for our new apartment. Hurray, a permanent place to perch! (Even better, we had tenants move into the Rudden house a week ago, so we're no longer in danger of needing to eat beans on toast for the forseeable future.) We'll move into our new place on July 1. It's a little pricier than we hoped, but it's huge by Swedish standards at 1500 sq. ft. and the location is pretty darned awesome. Just 2 blocks from "The Avenue," main library, art museum, amusement park, etc. Oh, and an olympic swimming pool, because then I'm REALLY going to start exercising, ha ha.

These pictures are admittedly really really horrible since they're from our 5-minute viewing of the apartment and everyone kept wanting to rush us down to the laundry room (not super nice, so ???), but they're all I have. The first is a view of the the street, Sodra Vagan, from the front of the apartment (we're on the 5th floor). The others are some interior shots from the entryway. It's called a 5-room apartment, but basically it's a 2 bd/1.5 bath with an extra work room thing off the kitchen that will be an office, guest room thing we think. We have two teeney balconies that I guess are a big deal here, though I don't know what you do with them except poke your hand out to see if it's raining or if you need a fleece or not. I'll email our new address out soon.

Apartment city

We are beginning to think about where to live after our temporary housing stint ends July 1. Gothenburg is full of apartment buildings -- in fact I don't think I've seen a single-family home since we've been here, which sort of boggles my mind -- so we'll likely be in an apartment. Some are 5- or 6-story, 19th Century buildings like the ones on Linnegatan behind Adrian in this picture, and many, especially a bit further out of the center of town, are newer and uglier (and perhaps bigger and more practical for a family of 4 inside?). I have to say these 1960's boxes totally depress me, so I'm crossing my fingers we can find something in the city center, though the rental market here is horrible, for various reasons that I only half understand. Something to do with the state regulating rental prices, and therefore there being little to no incentive for owners to rent out their properties. Everything has been rolling along nicely, so I'm sure we'll find something that we like.

On another note, Julian has his first ice cream cone today and it nearly blew his mind. He was covered in it and whenever I tried to take it away he started screaming like I've never heard and tears and boogers seemed to shoot out of him. He loved it so much he sort of look possessed and I swear at one point his eyes rolled back in his head. Sadly, I didn't have the camera with me, but even people sitting near us were watching in amusement/horror.